thistle and bling

I hit the road early yesterday, determined to get my nature walking in before the heat rose. I decided to stay within a half an hour's drive of home. I started at the Community Trail adjacent to Towne Lake Park in McKinney. There I saw a lovely red-bellied woodpecker. I think I also saw a painted bunting, but I am not sure, because it flew away so quickly. Then I drove to the Heard Natural Science Center. A cute little rabbit hid in the weeds on the Hoot Owl Trail. I saw little leopard frogs hopping on the boardwalk over the wetlands section of the Bluestem Trail.On the Wood Duck Trail, the green herons issued warning calls and the great egrets and great blue herons flew away into their rookeries. On the grassland part of the trail, I came upon one of my favorite things. A tiger swallowtail butterfly was drinking from a purple thistle. This is always a great photo opportunity,and I snapped several pictures.

I went home and grabbed a shower.Then I went to Dicky's BBQ for some turkey. I stopped by Ross Dress for Less and bought a 15 dollar casual shirt. Then I drove home.

I recorded episode 3 of my Graham Wafer cloudcast and posted it on mixcloud.com. I managed to reduce but not eliminate the mains hum, through disconnecting the power line and through applying a notch filter at 60 mhz to the resulting sound.

Saturday in the early evening we went to Sofia Coppola's "The Bling Ring". We enjoyed the film very much. The film made "lost in translation" seem warm and fuzzy by comparison,though, so it is an odd, intriguing new exploration of celebrity culture and celebrity wannabe culture.

As to the real life childen who committed the crimes in the "Bling Ring", I am curious that they got very light sentences for what amounted to a series of thefts totalling over two million dollars in merchandise and cash. I recall when my home in Mesquite, Texas, was broken into some twenty five or so years ago. The break-in was a part of a series of small-value burgaries committed by two young miscreants. When those fellows were later caught, not for invading my home but for other homes on their crime spree, they each got 10 years. I recall there were aggravating circumstances. The thieves stole a bit of cash a mom had left out for her son's birthday, with a note. They wrote obscenities on the note. They opened Christmas presents, and left some note about something--perhaps it was Santa taking the presents back. But still, their merchadise haul was orders of magnitude less, and yet their sentences were double the California sentences. It's curious to me how time and place and culture and class figure into all this.